In the prior art, when walls need to be erected on a temporary basis, often such walls are formed by filling bags with sand and then stacking the bags to form the wall. For instance, when rivers or other bodies of water are threatening to flood, it is common that bags are filled with sand and levies are built by stacking the sandbags adjacent each other. If the sand were stacked without the bags, the sand would form a very broad low barrier and would be subject to the forces associated with the velocity of water acting on the sand. By containing the sand within bags, a wall which is taller and narrower at the base can be built and velocity forces of the water cannot act on individual sand granules and so the wall is stronger. Sandbags are also used for other purposes, such as to build walls in military applications, such as in building foxholes or other trenches or other infantry position reinforcements.
Prior art sandbags have a rectangular form with square corners, two longer opposing sides and two shorter opposing sides. Typically, one of the shorter opposing sides is open and is filled with sand. When the bags are stacked, these bags have joints therebetween which are provided along sides (typically short sides) of adjacent bags. These joints are generally perpendicular to a direction that the wall extends and have a length similar to a thickness of the wall being formed (or multiples of that thickness if a wall of multiple layers of bags is formed).
This prior art arrangement has numerous drawbacks. First, by orienting the joints between adjacent bags extending perpendicular to a thickness of the wall, the joints have a shortest possible length. When water is to be contained, one location of weakness is at the joint. By making the joint as short as possible, as with prior art sandbag walls, the greatest likelihood of water penetration exists.
Second, because the joints between adjacent bags extend perpendicular to the length of the wall, if excessively high forces are encountered by the wall, and the wall tends to bulge, nothing about this joint allows adjacent bags to work together to resist this bulging force. Furthermore, as bulging occurs, the joints open up further, encouraging water flow therethrough and further bulging and rupture of the wall. Accordingly, a need exists for lengthening this joint and orienting this joint in a way that causes the wall to have individual bags reinforce each other and resist water migration through the joints and strengthen the wall at the joints.